Out of Frame
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Let me tell you a story. On December 3rd, 1976, Bob Marley was shot. Four gunmen entered his gated compound, a bastion of music and Rastafari culture in elite uptown Kingston, and unloaded a spray of bullets towards the house. Outside, Marley's wife took a bullet to the head. And the scene inside was chaos. Friends, business associates, fellow musicians scrambled, hit the floor.
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As gunmen entered the house, one approached Marley in the doorway of his on-site recording studio. Marley's manager leapt in front of him, while Marley, it's said, turned sideways, a smaller target. The manager got the worst of it, catching five bullets. Onlookers were sure he'd died then and there. Marley escaped with grazes on his arm and chest. After two days in hiding, Marley performed in front of a crowd of 80,000 Jamaicans at National Heroes Park in Kingston.
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a 90-minute plea for peace for the small island nation on the brink of civil war. He closes the concert with the song So Jah Seh. The chorus goes, well, I'll play you a clip from the concert.
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At the end, he lifts his shirt to show his bandages to the crowd. So is cemented the legend of Bob Marley, third world John Lennon, voice of the voiceless, reggae messiah, though it only took him two days to show the doubters his wounds. But what if I told you that odds are good that you or your dad or your grandmother, that you were listening to a lot more Marley than people in Jamaica in 1976?
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That the hard process he undertook starting in 1972 to translate reggae music to European and American audiences necessarily put him at a step with Jamaica's fast-moving music industry. That the definitive book on reggae, Lloyd Bradley's Bass Culture, says, What if I told you the reason 80,000 people showed up that night?
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wasn't so much that this was a chance to see live the music they loved on record, but was instead a chance to see themselves as worthy of respect. What if I told you the speakers at Kingston parties the weekend Marley got shot were blaring something that sounded a whole lot different from Marley's music?
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That song's by King Tubby, he's one of the most important figures in the history of recorded music. A visionary, a technical prodigy, a godfather to everything from techno to rap. And of course, much less of a legend than Bob Marley.
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What's going on in 1976 around the iconic Smile concert is much more complicated than a prophet of peace inspiring a nation and, in turn, the world. It's instead a story of how the very process of turning someone or something into a legend, turning a moment or some music into a classic, how that comes at a cost to the truth while at the same time making its own different kind of truth. And that's a story that speaks not just to Jamaica, but to the music of 1976 in general.
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But for right now, the tale of Marley's shooting sits at a roiling crossroads of Black diasporic liberation thought, Cold War era politics, and the unbelievably competitive Jamaican music industry. Let's dig in. I'm Matt Collins, and you're listening to The Mine.
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Our story starts in the early 20th century, when Black liberation thinking plants the seeds for the Jamaican movement we'd come to call Rastafari. Thinkers and activists like Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey advocated for a coherent, pan-African sense of identity among the descendants of the Atlantic slave trade and those on the African continent struggling under colonialism. While some went as far as to seek repatriation, that is, return to Africa for members of the Black diaspora, all emphasized a sense of
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pride in African traditions, history, and culture. As Garvey himself famously put it, a people without knowledge of their past, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots. Garvey's own ambitious repatriation plan faltered. Adjusted for inflation, he got as far as to raise approximately $13 million, again, in today's money, from small-dollar donors by 1920. He used that money to buy four ocean liners and worked up a plan to purchase vast tracts of land from the Liberian government.
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but defeat would be snatched from the jaws of victory. J. Edgar Hoover's people had been infiltrating the operation, and the United States government subsequently jailed Garvey on mail fraud, deported him to Jamaica, and politely suggested the Liberian government sell that land to a multinational rubber conglomerate instead, which it did. And for our purposes, Garvey's tale ends there, except for one note. Back in Jamaica in the 1920s, after deportation, he prophesied that a black king would be crowned in Africa.
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And in 1930, the man called Rastafari Mekonnen would be crowned emperor of Ethiopia. He took the name Haile Selassie, king of kings, lord of lords, conquering lion of the tribe of Judah. And you want to talk about a man becoming a legend? Selassie invited it. Ethiopia was already a prominent feature of Pan-Africanism prior to his apparent fulfillment of Garvey's prophecy. Old maps named the continent we today call Africa Ethiopia. And the King James Bible continued this tradition.
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Accordingly, early Pan-African thinking called itself Ethiopianism, and black Christian churches called themselves Ethiopian Christian churches. And beyond the linguistic history here, Selassie invoked comparisons to biblical stories. The titles he took draw from the Bible. King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Lion of the Tribe of Judah. These refer to biblical passages. And his lineage supposedly traced back to King Solomon and Queen Sheba of the Old Testament. And Selassie earned admiration as a living symbol of African resistance to colonialism too.
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He beat back Italian colonial incursions in Ethiopia and held himself out as a ruler on equal terms with European leaders.
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Triangulating black liberation thinking, biblical language, and Selassie's image and inspiration, the Rastafari belief system emerged. Scholars call it a religion, though it's decentralized and remarkably contemporary in its concerns. Many Rastafari consider it closer to a philosophy or simply a way of life. And central to this belief system is the notion of Babylon. Babylon was a real place, of course, and also a significant player in both halves of the Christian Bible. First, as a site of degeneracy and antagonism in the Old Testament,
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and second as a metaphor for the anti-Christian Roman Empire in the new. And Babylon to the Rastafari embodies the system that keeps them down. As a Jesuit priest who spent a few years living with Rastafari in the early 70s put it, it's quote, the whole complex of institutions which conspire to keep the black man enslaved in the Western world and which attempt to subjugate colored people throughout the world, end quote. And so Babylon, it can be the history of the Atlantic slave trade and the suffering it contained. It can be the police, the government,
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the unequal economic system of colonialism. And it can be the brainwashing of black people through European education and religious institutions to make them, Jamaican black liberation academic Walter Rodney put it, convinced of their own inferiority. And look, I could go on a deep dive on Rastafari cosmology here, the deification of Salasi as to some the second coming of Jah, God. Zion is the promised land, idealized or actual repatriated Africa. And the term I and I in place of we,
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as an expression of the individuality and godliness of each person. But it's that Rodney idea where the real action is to me, embodied by the recurring Rastafari symbol of the lion. In lion, per Jamaican cultural theorist Dennis Forsythe, it symbolizes power, dignity, fearlessness, and the wholesome integrity which comes from self-realization. The lion isn't sneaky, it doesn't hide its identity, it's noble, bold, proud. Which is where the rubber really meets the road for Rastafari.
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Whether it's the lion or the dreadlocks or the commitment to organic food and herbal medicine, there's a deep sense of bucking European derived expectations and ways of being and proudly substituting them with something their own. Something African, something Jamaican, something black. Jamaican psychologist and social theorist, Leahcim Samaj, sums it up like this. He says, quote, in a generic sense, a Rastafarian is one who is attempting to restructure identity so that she or he can consciously live from an Afrocentric perspective.
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Rastafari therefore provides a vehicle through which and by which the Africans in the diaspora can recreate an African identity." quote. Because for all this leveraging of history, its cosmology, its exploration of roots, Rastafari is really about building a sense of black identity in the present, one tied to those roots. And it's worth emphasizing just how important conceptually this was at the time.
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Jamaica's population was and remains overwhelmingly black. And that vast swath of the population existed for most of the island's modern history as enslaved laborers on British sugarcane plantations. And we'll get into that history more in a minute, but I want to touch on the high level social dynamic first. The European elites not only actively denigrated and stamped out African traditions at the expense of European ones during the course of slavery and after emancipation while colonial rule persisted, they lived out an apparent reality that whiteness, Europeanness was associated with the good things in
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And in that environment, black Jamaicans had no quarter. Whiteness, Europeanness, it could never be theirs. But to the extent that their history and traditions even managed to persist through the severe oppression of slavery, blackness offered no solace either, representing only the absence of whiteness. And so it's that space between those two that Rastafari fills. It says to potential converts, it says, through blackness, you can have an identity to be proud of today. Through blackness, you can name the things that are keeping you down. And through blackness, you can imagine a better tomorrow for yourself and for your family.
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And to go back to the history here, that idea had a lot of potential takers in Jamaica in the mid-1900s when it's gaining a foothold. The 1960 census put 77 % of the population as African and 17 % mixed, with the remaining 6 % divided between East Indian, Chinese, Syrian, European, and others. And again, everyone who was there is there for one historical reason only, slavery. As Haitian-American anthropologist Michel Rovtrio has explained,
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British sugar islands like Jamaica were not just societies that had slavery, they were slave societies. And that distinction is really key. He says, quote, slavery defined their economic, social and cultural organization. It was their raison d'etre. The people who lived there, free or not, lived there because they were slaves. The Northern equivalent would be for the whole continental United States to look like the state of Alabama at the peak of its cotton career, end quote.
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Or as a Jamaican politician would put it when describing Jamaican history, the settlers quickly concluded that the tropics are more pleasant if somebody else does the work. And so emancipation, as enslaved people in Jamaica achieved in the 1830s, it didn't deeply disrupt the social and labor model of Jamaica. Still under British rule and without a radical economic makeover, formerly enslaved people were forced to go to their old masters for work. And those old masters brought in labor competition from other parts of the British Empire, like India, driving down labor costs.
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And since land ownership restrictions and existing claims to the best land for farming were maintained, newly freed Jamaicans were forced to marginal lands of no use to the plantation model. Lands they'd be pushed off of once again after the colonial agriculture industry realized they could be used for coffee and bananas. This in turn leads to a significant urban migration in search of work, which gives us a significant population of black Jamaicans in the capital city of Kingston, a trend which would only continue as the 20th century war on.
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The population of Kingston would more than double between 1943 and 1970, from 200 to over 500,000. And many of those new arrivals are unemployed.
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Meanwhile, Jamaica's demographically aligned inequality continues. The plantation model isn't designed to make a local society work. It's meant to extract value from the periphery and send it back to the center. So this isn't just that local whites are wealthier than black Jamaicans. It's that European foreigners control a significant amount of resources on the island. So suffice to say that a tremendous amount of the black population in Kingston in the mid-1900s is deeply impoverished, living in slums, a ghetto, what they call a favela in Brazil. Take your pick.
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And these are the people to Rastafari really speaks, eventually. Because it takes some time. Rastafari is initially seen as something of a lunatic religious cult. Its philosophical notion of Black Pride lands alternately as unserious and threatening. Unserious because respectable religion and philosophy were seen as, again, the province of European culture. And threatening because it didn't genuflect in front of that very culture. And from the 30s through the mid-50s, the Rastafari movement grew slowly, treading small protest marches and arrests with the state.
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But as the 60s arrived, ascendant Black Power movement in the United States reached Jamaican shores. Jamaican academics started to embrace Rastafari in the early 60s, being the first Jamaican institution to do so. The government, fully independent after decades of decolonization and an act of the UK Parliament in 1962, it sponsors a fact-finding mission to Africa to explore the possibility of repatriation. And Haile Selassie himself came to Jamaica in 1966, where he privately met with Rastafari leaders.
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So by the late sixties, Rastafari perspectives are now approaching the mainstream, embraced even by those who would look down on them just five to 10 years earlier. The independent government of Jamaica didn't entirely know what to do with this. Jamaica's first political leadership after independence was the Jamaican Labour Party, the JLP. And I've conceptualized the JLP as having a voting pace akin to today's far-right movements around the globe. They triangulate elite interests in a disaffected underclass through a message of economic freedom. And our opposition here is the People's National Party, the PNP.
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And I've conceptualized the PNP as being similar to today's center-left political parties, capturing a swath of working middle and professional classes by flirting with far-left positions but never quite committing to them. In both these parties, they have their roots in union organizing and mobilizing the significant unemployed population in Kingston. So this isn't quite Trump versus Clinton, right? But to me, at least, the mental shorthand of left liberal versus elite populist helps illuminate the dynamic between the JLP and the PNP.
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But to our story here in the JLP, they're kind of caught in a bind here. Jamaican Black Pride swells over the course of the 60s, but the capital and elite-friendly part of their project involves selling Jamaicans a vision of Jamaican exceptionalism built not on Black Pride, but on a sense of social harmony between racial groups on the island. Meanwhile, their everyman base is increasingly embracing Rastafari thinking. After winning re-election in 1967, JLP leadership bans Walter Rodney, that Black liberation academic who's grown increasingly popular over the 60s. They ban him from returning to the country.
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This only boosts the movement's profile and positions the JLP in some opposition to it. And this shifting terrain sets the stage for Jamaica's entry into the U.S. foreign policy conversation.
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but not as entry into the minds of your average American. Now that would have happened in 1964 when they first heard this.
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That's Millie Small's cover of doo wop diddy "My Boy Lollipop," which reached the US Top 10 in 1964 with the help of British Jamaican music producer Chris Blackwell. And Chris Blackwell, well, remember that name. And that song there is an example of ska, predecessor of rock setting, predecessor of reggae. And the reason that song crossed over so well to the US is that it's a mutation of a familiar sound, American rhythm and blues.
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In Jamaican audiences, they loved R &B. It was the most popular music of the 50s, and it was caught on the airwaves from New Orleans and Miami, as well as imported to be played at home. But as the U.S. market turned more towards rock music as the 60s approached, there was less American R &B to import. Jamaican music producers moved quickly to fill the gap. And so emerged not only Ska with his funky, upbeat, emphasizing take on American R &B. That upbeat, that's that dun dun dun dun dun dun beat. It's not just the Ska sound that emerges.
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but an entirely unique ecosystem of musician, producer, and audience. And at the core of that ecosystem, what that whole ecosystem orbits around, is the sound system. The sound system is, at heart, a portable club, and is basically a solution to the problem that many in urban Kingston couldn't afford to stereo or to go out to hear music. So enterprising promoters brought the music to them. They'd haul speakers in on trucks and play music in vacant lots on street corners and other public places across the city.
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and they became the primary way the underclass in Kingston heard music at all. And dating to the days of imported American R &B records, there was a culture of getting people to show up by having exclusive access to the hottest new tracks. Young kids working for the sound system, they would make a show of racing from the docks with the latest imported record in tow to build excitement for the newest music that that night's lawn dance had to offer. So when the industry turned from American imports to local Jamaican music, sound system operators were at the center of it. If you wanted to get your music out,
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You needed to play it on a sound system. And many operators became music producers themselves, integrating the stack of production and distribution. And through it all, they retained the culture of constant novelty. So you've got this economy where there's a limited number of distributors and producers who are often the same person or at least close collaborators. And they've got house bands and songwriters, repeat players they like to work with. And musicians, they rotate around the carousel of producers trying to get their song cut or get their chance to hit it big. And by and large, people don't really care about copyright.
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in this industry, at least not in the way we're used to it in the American music industry. Like sound system operators would scratch out information on the record labels as a way to protect trade secrets, but this was less about owning the music than about making sure no one could steal the secret sauce of your sound system operation. And so in this environment, creativity and authorship at large, it's much more social. Some musicians have a level of local popularity to be sure, but it's the producers and sound system operators who are the biggest names in town.
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And this leads to a type of musical creativity that British media scholar Jason Toynbee describes as intensification. The entire musical community is orbiting around and advancing the same general sound. And he sees that upbeat tradition in ska as the aesthetic zone where the entire community of musical creatives in Kingston is focusing their work, intensifying the upbeat emphasis and making it more and more central to Jamaican popular music. I'll play you a snippet here instead of doing it myself again.
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That's Justin Hines on the dominoes with Botheration off the 65 playlist. In that clip, it really captures the upbeat moment I'm talking about in ska and which comes to dominate Jamaican music in the future. And that intensified emphasis on the upbeat, it leads to a slowed down, more rhythmic focused evolution of ska that's called rock steady.
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This is generally seen to have a very brief run just a couple of years in the late 60s and it sounds like this. That's the paragons, the tide is high, later covered by Blondie. And to untrained ears, this probably resembles something like slow Ska. But I think Toynbee's theory of intensification explains the musical evolution we're hearing here.
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And the sound system infrastructure is always pushing towards a more bass heavy sound that flatters the slower rhythm of rock study. But beyond the music, reggaetonian Lloyd Bradley, he offers a social explanation in his book, Bass Culture, I mentioned at the top. He says, quote, another reason for the downshift in tempo was a measurable increase in tension in the dance halls. He continues that the sixties were the beginning of the rude boy era, the period in Jamaican history when violence was established as a popular profession, end quote.
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You see, these sound systems weren't neutral spaces, not most of them at least. In Kingston in the 60s and 70s, few places were. The poor parts of the city were governed by what's been termed garrison politics. Entire neighborhoods held allegiance to local gang leaders who themselves had connections to the political establishment. Oxford geographer Colin Clarke in a really interesting book on urbanization in Jamaica, he describes how, quote, a major feature of ghetto politics has been the emergence of garrison communities where virtually the entire electorate
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votes for the same candidate, and any opposition is treated as a threat to the hegemony of the ruling party."
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So neighborhoods voted for political parties lockstep and political victory meant kickbacks for the neighborhood. Jobs, benefits, protection. Political defeat, meanwhile, brought the opposite. Active harassment from the government and rescindment of benefits. And because government housing is one of the key benefits of this patronage system, these communities only get increasingly segregated. And famously, the JLP leadership in the 1960s demolished an existing community to build what is today Tivoli Gardens and gave housing there to JLP supporters.
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Tivoli remains a JLP stronghold to this day and made international headlines in 2010 over US attempts to extradite a crime boss based in the neighborhood. And so it's in this swirl of garrison politics that the archetype called the Rude Boy emerges. Sometimes an active gang member, other times a freelance criminal capitalizing on the greater dysfunction. And Colin Clarke, he describes the Rude Boy as someone for whom, quote,
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rudest, best-looking, baddest character on the gully bank." And so rude boys and organized criminals made violence increasingly a part of daily life in Kingston. JLP-aligned gangsters attacked a PNP neighborhood one day. PNP-aligned gangsters attacked a JLP political event as reprisal the next. And the commingling of politics, criminality, and just plain people's homes swept everyone in the slums of Kingston into the fray, whether they wanted it or not. If we buy Bradley's take earlier,
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that rocksteady responded to the increased tension of its time. It follows that as tensions continued to rise in the late 1960s and early 70s, Jamaican music only got slower. And reggae is the slowest style yet.
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very well when he remembers Zion.
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That's The Melodians with Rivers of Babylon. And in that 10 second snippet, you can already hear how reggae connects the dots between Jamaican music's ever-slowing pace and the ascendant sense of Black pride in the country as we get to the end of the 1960s. Music of this era increasingly addresses issues of justice, African heritage, and all the evils of Babylon. And the general style of the time morphs from the flashy European and American inspired image of the root boy to the dreadlocked African inspired image you have of Jamaica today.
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Sound systems are still going, and so is the violence that permeates the Kingston underclass. But it's increasingly informed by Rastafari philosophy. And the Rastafari themselves, they saw reggae as a weapon towards beating down Babylon. The Jamaican people can be restored to pride through reggae, is the idea, and musicians can speak the truth about the order under which they live. And reggae by the early 70s, it's everywhere, including the campaign trail.
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Come to me
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That's Delroy Wilson with Better Must Come, the unofficial theme song of the opposition PNP in the 1972 election. Because as that election approaches the PNP, they see a window. High unemployment, violence, and a JLP and a bind on the rising sense of Black pride in the country, it sets up the party for a strong opposition message. Led by the charismatic Michael Manley, the PNP leans into left-ish policies for the underclass.
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But it leans harder into what we might call the politics of pride. So there are some policy promises around jobs and housing, to be sure. But more than that, a story of genuine independence, an ability for Jamaica to choose its own fate, a national identity that isn't tied to European values. And manly, he would later talk about how political independence confers no magic of its own other than the benefits to the national psyche. So he saw in his project one of pushing Jamaica towards true independence, true self-determination.
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And in terms of marketing, he'd campaign on a heavily Rastafari-inflected cultural platform. His supporters nicknamed him Joshua, nod to the man who led exiled Israelites to the promised land in the Old Testament. He carried a staff called the Rod of Correction, who claimed to have gotten from Haile Selassie himself. And the PNP musical bandwagon, a flatbed truck that served as an impromptu stage, it toured the country, giving a literal platform to reggae musicians, including Bob Marley. This works. The PNP wins overwhelming.
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A moment that in my mind is reminiscent of Obama in 2008, as much a victory for a story of the nation's identity as a particular policy vision, and a story that promises optimism for the oppressed. And Manley quickly gets to work on his agenda. The government passes some labor laws that try to pull the country out of its post-slavery approach to the labor market. He sets up a rural development program to try to get smaller farmers off the ground rather than foreign-based large-scale agriculture. And he undertakes efforts to promote adult education and literacy.
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Carl Stone, that create Jamaican political scientists, he would describe Manley's policies as follows, Mr. Manley's domestic policies involved little more than a Keynesian emphasis on expansionist and interventionist fiscal and economic management policies, allied with a strong impulse towards regulating the private sector and establishing a mixed economy, which would balance private sector ownership with a strong state owned sector, end quote. To translate that to plain English, Stone sees Manley's economic policies as not particularly radical.
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much more reformist and similar to American economics in the World War II era, if with a little more ownership of operations by the state. But regardless of the details, Manley's rhetoric spooks the United States. And for reference, this is the Nixon Kissinger days, and the U.S. is still smarting from its loss in Cuba barely a decade prior. So another story of genuine third world independence in its backyard, not to mention some policy reforms that help local Jamaicans at the expense of foreign, often U.S. capital, that has D.C. on edge.
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And I should pause for a second and observe here. Before it became something of a slur, Third World just meant non-aligned post-colonial countries. That is, not American or Soviet line, the first and second worlds. And Manley talked proudly about Third World unity. At a time when a bunch of newly independent countries were finding their footing, unified non-alignment presented a potential path towards a better tomorrow outside of both the colonial and Soviet order. And a path that the United States wasn't too interested in seeing these nations follow.
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But anyway, back to our story. A wary United States and a fiery Manley, they're increasingly digging in over the course of his first term in office. The United States and its capitalists, they refuse to abide any of Manley's reforms, including attempts to assess a levy on multinational aluminum companies that exploit bauxite. That's a key ingredient in aluminum manufacturing and one of Jamaica's biggest natural resources. And for his part, Manley increasingly sees the United States as a barrier to making meaningful change. He later write that he increasingly realized, quote,
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No national aspirations were likely to be realized in Jamaica or elsewhere in the third world unless and until their economies could be modified and restructured." And he's talking here about an entire new economic order, one that doesn't keep Jamaica, in his eyes, in the essentially colonized, unfree position of being beholden to European and American-aligned capital.
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And so in 1974, the PNP officially declares itself a Democratic Socialist Party. And they're fully intending here to distance themselves from Soviet-aligned communism. But at the same time, they're trying to pursue a vision of government that sees a much stronger role for the state.
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And so Manley imposes the bauxite levy and increases government involvement in tourism, agriculture, and other industries. And he increasingly makes foreign policy a key part of his project. Jamaica's diplomatic ties to Cuba increase. Manley supports Angola's Marxist government, and he becomes a loud voice for non-alignment around the globe. Reports surface in Penthouse Magazine, of all places, that the CIA attempts to have Manley assassinated in 1975. Manley, for his part,
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paints a vivid picture of CIA destabilization of Jamaica, in which his opponents in the JLP are complicit. Later historians, they do grant this claim some amount of credence, although it's not as well established as United States involvement in places like Chile in the same general era. But whatever the cause, for purposes of Jamaicans living in Kingston as 1976 nears, tensions are dangerously high. In 1979, Carl Stone would write,
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was the level and use of violence and guns." Yeah. People are stopped in the street to declare what party they stood with, facing violence if they didn't answer or gave the wrong answer. And over 100 people are shot between late 1975 and the December 1976 election, including political candidates. In January 1976, JLP gangs attacked residents of Rosedown, a PNP stronghold. A description of the event by Jamaican political scientist Obika Gray describes how,
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They fired on each other from rooftops in daring exchanges that saw no police interference, even as residents scurried for their lives. Savage hand-to-hand combat took place in close quarters while other embittered partisans exchanged gunfire, threw fire bombs, and hurled bottles and stones at each other."
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In May, a tenement yard with 500 people living in it, crammed into 200 small rooms, it set ablaze, ostensibly an act of gang retaliation, but some claim political intimidation. 11 people die, many of them children. Police officers are shot, a special forces unit goes on strike. I could go on here. If you're ready for a more vivid picture of Jamaica in 1976, go read Marlon James brilliant, A Brief History of Seven Killings, a brutally violent
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mythologization of the year leading up to Marley's shooting. But whether this violence is the result of social disorder, U.S. interference or organized crime, the heart of it is that in 1976, this is just what Jamaican politics looks like. And I'm to quote Obika Gray again here. He says, quote, political dominance in Kingston's Western belt of urban constituencies came not from peaceful balloting, but rather from crushing political opposition in the streets and routing terrified residents.
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guns, not votes, therefore determine political outcomes in the Western belt." End quote. And to read Gray's history of violence in Jamaica in 1976, it's to read something that sounds like a war history. The PNP captures this neighborhood. The JLP tactically moves to take another. And this alignment between place, politics, employment opportunities, government patronage, all that, that increasingly ruled Jamaican politics, and now has the added gloss of hardline ideology.
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The JLP describes its crusade as something like McCarthyism, stomping out the red thread at home. And the PNP, for its part, it sees its crusade as one for genuine freedom and independence from the US-led order, a real struggle against Babylon. And in a way, I think looking at this with an eye of who's to blame, it kind of misunderstands the entire scenario. The numerous histories I read seem to identify this trend as beginning with the JLP, who really perfected the mix of criminality, patronage, and politics that came to define the experience of Kingston in the 1970s.
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And of course you've got the specter of US CIA interference. But at the end of the day, this was what Jamaican politics had evolved to. If you wanted to achieve things in government, you had to play this game. Manley caught flak for publicly thanking gang enforcers after a political victory. Despite claiming the JLP is the main problem here, he talks about how PNP elements hit back, sometimes giving as good as they got, he says. And to his credit, Manley undertook some efforts to reduce violence.
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He created the gun court in 1974, a forbidding barbed wire enclosed stockade near the cricket ground on South Camp Road for that reggae historian, Lloyd Bradley, and a place where a conviction for firearm possession could come with a life sentence. And of course, there's the notion that policies promoting education, employment, equality, they're structural ways to reduce violence. But come June 1976, things are too violent to bear. Manley declares a state of emergency after the Peruvian ambassador is murdered in his home.
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If we believe the Bradley theory about Jamaican music, it makes sense that it only got slower and deeper, more prideful and more laden with dread over the course of Manley's tenure.
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By 1972 already, Reggae was not just slow ska with Rastafari undertones. It was a vocabulary unto itself. But as the 70s go on, the trappings of American R &B are all but erased, reduced to that ever-slowing upbeat skank. Let's hear what it sounds like here in Burning Spears' 1974 track, Marcus Garvey.
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Oh
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Drum patterns increasingly draw on the Rastafari tradition of Nyabinghi drumming, itself indebted to African traditions retained through the oppression of slavery and beyond. Which, well, let's hear some Nyabinghi drumming.
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And I don't mean to oversell this. Most reggae acts are not getting all the way to hand drums here, but the way they're approaching rhythm, it starts to get more circular, hypnotic, and meditative in the Nyabinghi tradition. And beyond drawing on Rastafari musical styles, lyrical content goes from channeling some Rastafari cosmology to being a significant arena in which Rastafari philosophy is shaped and spread. And this is Roots Reggae, a remarkable example of that unstable concept of folk authenticity we talked about in the last episode.
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This era of reggae feels like the most authentic vision of Jamaican cultural identity. But just five years prior, nothing like it existed. Only the disparate threads that would ultimately come together to make it happen.
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And it's in this period that Bob Marley decamps to London to give it a go selling reggae to the world. Chris Blackwell, you remember him earlier, producer of that early crossover ska hit from the 60s, he's still trying to sell Jamaican music to the world. He's British Jamaican, raised in Jamaica while his family was over there for his father to work in the British military's Jamaica regiment. And he's involved in the local music industry early. But he's not a sound system guy. His competitive advantage in the local market is distribution.
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So he's kind of outside that rapidly evolving game of novelty that is the mainstream Jamaican music industry from the start. And he's much better positioned to make inroads in Europe and America than your average Jamaican producer whose connections and expertise are all about the sound system.
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And he's had some success making crossover acts hit since My Boy Lollipop. Most notably, Jimmy Cliff's The Harder They Come soundtrack, and it's swaggering accompanying film. They do decent numbers outside of Jamaica. And I absolutely adore that soundtrack. Let's take a beat here to admire it. You can get it if you really want You can get it if you really want You can get it if you really want But you must try, try and try
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That's You Can Get It If You Really Want by Jimmy Cliff, a real heater. But for how decently Cliff crossed over, he never really took hold. And Blackwell is continuing to look for a real rock star celebrity. Starting in 1972, Marley is his latest effort. Marley, at this point, he's a successful local artist. But again, the Jamaican music scene, it's not in the business of selling musician celebrities in the way we understand The Beatles, Taylor Swift, you name it.
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And though there's been some international crossover, Ska and reggae are somewhere in the neighborhood of interesting curiosities overseas. There aren't statement reggae albums, really. The Jamaican industry, it emphasizes singles. And without someone on the ground in the US or UK embodying the celebrity lifestyle, it's imported music. Maybe think of it like K-pop in the mid 2010s. Gangnam style as a major crossover event, but also kind of a one-hit curiosity. And then a smattering of solid songs getting attention, but not really generating a celebrity.
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And thanks to the work he puts in after 1972, Marley finally becomes BTS. He starts delivering album-length visions of reggae, and his work is inflected with rock music's vocabulary, style, and values, even if it remains without a doubt reggae. mean, no one in Jamaica is making something that sounds as Eric Clapton-coded as this, right?
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you
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Chorus of backup singers that lush layered accompaniment. Look, Jamaican producers, weren't shy about multi-tracking, but Marley's project sits alongside contemporaries in Europe and America as something in the same register, not a curio from another world. And that's thanks to a more spacious approach to the mix, a rock-inflected emphasis on guitar work, and a slightly more familiar verse chorus structure of the songwriting. And Marley puts out five records between 1973 and 76, each one bigger than the last. And by 1976...
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his album Rastaman Vibration lands in the US top 10.
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But the interesting thing here is how much this whole project put Marley out of step with Jamaica's fast evolving music scene. To put it bluntly, Marley is selling the Jamaican music of 1972 with a higher budget sheen to Europe and America. While Jamaica itself is as ever rapidly moving on to something new.
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And that's something that has a lot to do with King Tubby and his music. Called dub.
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King Tellby is first and foremost an electrician. And I mean that literally. His day job? The guy's an electrician. And he's by all accounts a certified genius of transistors and conduit. And if you haven't put together why that positions Tubby to be a major player in Jamaican music, I'll connect the dots for you. It's all in the sound system. Sound systems competed on novelty, sure, but they also competed on sound quality. And Tellby's high fidelity setup was literally the best one in Kingston. Thanks to his electrical know-how, he would wire at complex setups.
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So he'd advance the ball on something of a surround sound experience, wiring speakers and trees. And he'd improve sound quality by separating different frequencies out to different speakers and boosting different ranges. That's the in the weed stuff, not that audiences didn't walk away with a general sense of being impressed by the quality. But there was the obvious stuff too. He'd deck the massive chrome sound system out in brilliant black, green and gold. The Rastafari colors drawing on imagery associated with both Garvey and Solasi.
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And he invented new sound effects you couldn't hear anywhere else on the island. Echo, echo, echo, delay,
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and he'd apply those effects to both the music he was playing and to the DJ. And we should talk for a second about the DJ. Since the earliest days of the sound system, DJs would host the event. And confusingly, in Jamaican music, DJs are more or less what we think of as MCs in America. And DJs, would introduce songs, they'd hype the crowd, they'd promote the sound system. And as time wore on, the role of the DJ grew. What began as accompaniment increasingly became performance itself. And by the 70s, the...
41:50
Toasting at a lawn dance, the DJ's now prolonged, detailed rhythmic pattern. The toasting was a part of the appeal as much as the music itself. This led producers to make instrumental versions of tracks, reducing a song down to its backing rhythm, or riddim, R-I-D-D-I-M. And over that riddim, DJs could toast in ever more extravagant ways. And this was mostly a live event, but there were proper recordings in this style, including this telly production with frequent DJ collaborator, U-Roy, toasting on top of it.
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And so when King Tellby is making music of his own, he's often making riddims, music designed to be toasted over. And I don't think it can be overstated just how visionary King Tellby was. If you've heard a remix, a rap song, Jamaican dancehall music, King Tellby was there first.
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If you've heard Joy Division's haunting echoes, Burial's clattering percussion, Portishead's woozy beat, that's Tubby again. If you've heard a single song that plays with the very medium of recorded music, King Tubby. Tubby was, for all intents and purposes, doing what the digital studio enabled in mainstream American and European music production, except he was doing it more than five years before mainstream music production got there, and he was using rudimentary analog technology he cobbled together in the poorest part of a small island in the Caribbean.
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And tell me I want to be clear, he wasn't a musician in the standard sense and not even a producer. He made music one way and one way alone. He remakes other people's songs.
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and by all accounts, he was a virtuoso.
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The way his setup worked, he would do it live. Musicians and producers would show up at his house. His studio was first in his bathroom and bedroom, eventually overtaking the whole place. And he would run their recordings through his mixing board, applying sound effects, playing with a volume of different frequencies, and bringing tracks in and out of the multi-track mix in real time, often to emphasize the strong rhythmic backbone of bass and drums. Michael Veale, who wrote a fantastic book on Dove,
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describes him as indebted to American jazz musicians, saying, And it's said that musicians would wait outside all night while Tubby knocked out an incredible amount of tracks in one sitting. One estimate said he'd do four albums worth of songs in a single night.
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And what he's pressing a lot of the time, it's called a dub plate. And that's a fast pressed record that short circuits the vinyl record manufacturing process. But physically a dub plate, doesn't hold up very long, just a few plays. So it's the perfect vehicle for sound system culture, constantly searching for novelty. And to the extent you were supposed to go buy a record after hearing a dub version, you were supposed to go buy the original. The sort of preview effect offered by snippets of melody or lyrics, it invited the listener to go hear the whole thing.
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all of which makes dub's export abroad kind of an interesting phenomenon. There's no toasting usually on the recordings themselves. And again, it's generally understood as sort of an advertisement for the real thing, the remixed song. But the standalone rhythms nonetheless catch the ears of a lot of musicians and producers overseas, especially in Britain with its long tradition of Jamaican-British musical cross-pollination.
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And there's a reason why this caught on. It's really great stuff. The record widely seen as Tubby's Peak is called King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown. And it's a collection of remixes he did for producer and musician Augustus Pablo's Rockers International record label. And though Pablo wasn't making this heavily processed dub himself, the woozy, melodica-heavy sound he favored certainly contributes to the way dub music comes off as otherworldly. In the melodica, it's essentially a keyboard mixed with a clarinet. You blow into it and play keyboard keys. And when Pablo plays it,
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It sounds like this.
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And that melodica sound is all over this King Tubby record. Let's start with hearing it on closing track, Satta Dub.
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this song has a long history of its own. The original version of that ghostly melody, it dates to 1971 when the Abyssinians dropped Satta Massagana, rightfully seen as one of the best reggae tunes of all time.
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This births a bunch of covers and you can hear a Nya Binghy heavy take on it at the beginning of the 1978 Jamaican film Rockers. And that movie is a great companion to The Harder They Come to show how Kingston went from the rude boys to rastas over the course of the 60s and 70s. anyway, let's hear that Nya Binghy take here.
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you
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And so in 1975, Augustus Pablo, he drops his melodica-laden take on Satta Massagana, reasonably enough called Pablo Satta.
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And that's the version that Tellby remixes. And let's hear again what Tubby does to it.
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Let's just listen technically for a second, like literally what is he doing to the song? So obviously there's echo, reverb, delay, amping up the otherworldiness of the melodica and the melody itself. And he's taking things out of the mix, panning them left and right and manipulating how prominent they are, especially giving the bass increased heft.
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and he's deploying one of his favorite tools to manipulate the way the music sounds with audio engineering. And that tool is the high pass filter. And a high pass filter, it's essentially an equalizer. That is to say, it allows an audio engineer to boost certain frequencies and quiet others. But with the filter, you're telling the machine to quiet everything below a certain frequency cutoff and privilege the higher end. And by manipulating the high pass filter, where the cutoff is, how much you quiet the low end and boost the high end, you can create some really interesting dynamics.
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And this is trick you see all the time in electronic music. If you've ever heard an EDM song build towards the climax, but there's no reason in the songwriting for that dynamic. Like the music is just looping, but somehow it's also building tension. The high-pass filter plays a huge part in giving that sensation. The music gets thinner, but the pulse remains as the filter is applied. And then the drop happens when the filter is removed and the low end comes back in. So what you're listening for in the drop here from Zedd's Clarity, it's the way it gets reedy as the filter is cranked up and then the filter is removed at the big moment.
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And look, Tubby's not doing that, not exactly, but he loves the high pass filter and its ability to manipulate a song's dynamic and impact and tracks all over the record oscillate between an eerie filtered sound and more bass heavy moments.
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And that's all well and good, but what does all this technical wizardry add up to? And Tubby's most famous track here is the album's namesake, King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown. And it's a remix of a Pablo production by Jacob Miller called Baby I Love You So.
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And this song has already got a lot of great components. A killer bassline, clattering percussion, Pablo's melodica. In Tubby's hands, these components are pulled apart and recombined. The bassline and clattering percussion are boosted and often soloed, providing the foundation for the whole song.
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you
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And the vocal line and melodica are chopped into pieces that float and echo across the mix, ghostly fragments of the original melody.
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And look, this just plain sounds cool, right? Hearing cool sounds is his own reward. But I think that dub historian Michael Veele, he has some really compelling social stuff to stay here to. He hears in dub a lot of what we talked about in Jamaican music in general. He hears in the music's echoing sound effects an audible sign of the black diasporic experience of yearning for a cultural homeland that can never be experienced as home. And he hears a lot shared with Rastafari and the Manley Political Project in dub's reassembled fragments saying quote,
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The music's elasticity of form provided the perfect crucible for an elastic reimagining of history, a meditation crucial to the cultural consciousness of the new nation." And of course, he hears the violence.
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That's another 70s production, here remixing Johnny Clark amidst gunshot sound effects on Bag a Wire Dub. And I'll read one last line from Veal. He says, participants on an evening mixing session at Tubby's would often lock themselves in the studio until dawn while gunfire raged around them, end quote. You see, Tubby was from the Waterhouse neighborhood of Kingston.
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Politically unaligned, Waterhouse was a hotbed for violence as neither party defended it and the opposing factions fought to claim it. And so Tubby's dub, it's the sound of 1976 Jamaica. Wrestling with questions of identity, tradition and history, but doing so in ways that are inexorably caught up in the present and its violence. And he's literally disassembling classic reggae in real time and recombining it into something else entirely.
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So when Marley agreed to perform a concert per piece in 1976, at Manley's invitation, but trying desperately to distance himself from any explicit politics and the violence inherent in them, he wasn't performing in front of a crowd of huge reggae fans. And 80,000 people showed up that night not so much because he was the hottest musical act in Jamaica, but because of what he symbolized. You see, Marley fundamentally undercut the logic behind European supremacy in Jamaica.
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By selling reggae to American and European audiences, he made it impossible for anyone to say that black Jamaican culture was less than that of the Europeans. If the story 15 years prior was that Rastafari, black pride, black Jamaican identity writ large was inherently less than European and American culture, and that the only path forward is to shed any remnants of blackness, that's impossible to square with a Rastafari, loudly proclaiming the Rastafari message, being a respected celebrity in the United States and in Europe.
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While Marley was cementing Jamaican music's classic era in the ears of many European and American listeners, King Tellby was making a much more complicated story in Jamaica itself, literally breaking these songs into pieces and reassembling an entire new musical vocabulary.
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And that split between the story of the classic and the messy reality, that's the core of hearing 1976 to me. And you've got classic music all over the place in 76. Classic rock, to be sure, like ELO.
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In Black American music alongside classic disco cuts, you've got classic soul holding on from the prior era.
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Of course, there's classic reggae and delvin jamaica, we've talked through that. But music from all over the map sounds classic, whether it's Mongo Santamaria's cuban jazz fusion sofrito.
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or music being made across Sub-Saharan Africa in the broad Afrobeat category, like the Nigerian Lijadu Sisters' slow-burning song, Amabo.
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Classic is obviously a broad category, but I'm having trouble spotting songs from 1976 that couldn't be described as such. Punk music, the reaction to the type of album-oriented rock we think of as peak classic rock, is now simply classic itself. And think punk's pretty interesting because for all its associations with being, you know, cooler than AOR, it's kind of reactionary, calling back to the past, to the simpler days of 50s-era pop music.
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Sweet little girl
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And so it's songs that draw on a different past that sound a little out of step, like the Flamin' Groovies' British Invasion vibes.
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and songs that imagine a different future, like Bootsy Collins' Future Funk that wouldn't really be continued until the other side of the disco crash in the 80s.
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But let's unpack this. Why do nearly a hundred songs spanning musicians, genres, countries of origin, why do they all sound classic? And I think there's three explanations here. And the first continues episode one, and it's inherent in the music itself. And the second, it anticipates our next episode and has a lot to do with where the music industry was heading next. And the third has to do with what academics call cultural memory. And the first one, I think there's something inherently classic to the styles, textures, and techniques widely in use around 1976. Hear me out.
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If you buy the story from our first episode, the mid-60s represent a moment when traditional and popular styles are entering the recording studio and becoming new forms as recorded music objects. By the mid-70s, that project has now given us a very particular vision for the relationship between form, technology, and content. And so, a pretty stable notion of different genres and a relatively limited analog recording apparatus that producers have perfected a particular use of all around the globe. And on those genres,
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it's pretty clear we're well beyond those folk origins by now. If rock music started as blues, by the mid 70s it sounds like this, which I don't hear much blues in at all.
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And whether it's something like Thin Lizzy right there or the more baroque ELO from earlier, the sense is that rock is now its own self-contained thing operating by a set of rules that developed over the past decade or so, and which are now pretty detached from those blues origins. Similarly, disco has reduced R &B down to a pounding four to the floor beat and layered it with baroque ornamentation miles away from those same blues origins.
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And whether it's Irish rock, Cameroonian disco, or those British, American, Cuban, Nigerian classics from earlier, in all of these, instruments are miked closely, but still capture a sense of the room. The mid-range is privileged over booming bass or piercing treble, and compression ties the tracks together like you're in the room for the best live performance the band has ever done.
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And look, there's still significant multi-tracking. They're doing multiple takes for the perfect version of everyone's performance. It's an immaculately constructed artifact. But it's the peak of the approach to recording that really takes off in the 60s, aligned with the ossification of new genre conventions. And it's right before both the technology and sense of genres would start to fracture. Because as the 80s approach, you've got the rise of the digital studio and an increasingly fractured media environment. And we'll get into both of these in the next episode in more detail.
01:00:12
But suffice to say, the way music is made and accordingly how it sounds, it's on the precipice of a complete overhaul, thanks in part to people continuing the work of King Tubby. And the media environment is about to change too. Media in the 70s is still very much the broadcast model of a few points of distribution. Television is broadcast by a handful of local license holders subject to significant restrictions, and by this point, AM radio is still the predominant audio broadcasting standard.
01:00:39
AM's the home of pop radio, country, R &B, and news radio at the time, and it has most of the radio market. But FM is rapidly rising thanks to some licensing reforms and entrepreneurs. And it's in the story of those entrepreneurs that we can find the most significant reason the mid-70s sound so classic to today's And that is how we remember those years. In 1964, the FCC limited how much broadcasters could simulcast across AM and FM stations.
01:01:06
In other words, you had to start putting different content on FM stations than what was on AM. And before that, broadcasters, would just put the same content on both because there really wasn't much of an audience for FM. FM receivers weren't even in cars at this point.
01:01:20
Which means that once the FCC forces broadcasters to move, it's kind of the Wild West. Lots of creativity as people figure out what works. And so you see the emergence of underground rock radio, following a freeform model that diverges from AM radio's tight playlists. These stations play album cuts. DJs curate not only songs, but a sense of values around those songs. And a lot of the time, those values are political in the ways you'd expect. Anti-Vietnam War sentiment, smoking joints in the studio.
01:01:47
And so it's in this era that rock really cements its countercultural ethos.
01:01:54
But for all that counterculture from a business perspective, the idea here is actually to mimic classical radio. And classical radio, it knows that it's niche and it also knows how to sell ads to target its niche demographic. And these guys, they want to do the same thing, but for a rock audience. Their sense is that the Woodstock and hate Ashbury crowd, they're now yuppies. An advertiser described how the cult of 1968 has become the masses of 1978. And these masses, they still like rock music, but now they've got disposable income.
01:02:23
And the word lifestyle is coined around this time, and marketing and commerce is increasingly organized around selling things to people who live a certain lifestyle or desire to have that lifestyle. And what they're trying to do here is kind of unique up to that point in the history of popular music. In the decades before, there was a sense that there was popular teen music, and then there was adult music. You stop listening to teen music, that is singles music, as you age, and you start buying, you know, lounge music LPs.
01:02:52
But buying LPs requires more disposable income than listening to singles for free on the radio, and it makes record labels more money. So essentially the trick these rock radio guys pull is to keep boomers buying rock music as they age.
01:03:07
And throughout the 70s, they do this with album oriented rock, also known as AOR. That's your ELO, your Boston, those bands making immaculately recorded operatic records. And let's hear some Boston here for fun.
01:03:31
And even as these radio stations lose the freeform approach and start adopting playlists of their own, they're still playing album cuts. They're marketing rock artists with celebrity built around a sense of deep talent and authenticity.
01:03:44
But there's a tension there, For all the story of artistry and the counter-cultural subversive beginnings, rock music is unashamedly a mass consumer good. It's made by major labels and isn't shy about playing to big audiences. We talked in the first episode about how people in the folk scene were a little skittish about musicians like Dylan changing, getting bigger. Rock music has no such concerns.
01:04:07
And that tension right there is both the central irony of rock music and the reason for its position in society at the time and through to today. Canadian media scholar Keir Keightley describes how since rock allowed the listener to find the serious within the realm of mass produced popular music, it meant that consumers could continue to listen to rock music and buying it throughout the aging process. And while rock borrowed folk sense of authenticity, it twisted its politics in new directions. As Keightley says, quote,
01:04:36
that critique of mass society central to the folk polemic was reduced to a critique of mass pop." End quote. And so Yuppies could continue to consume the music of their teen years into adulthood in the form of seriously artistic long playing records, as long as it had an other it was not, in this case, pop music. And this in part explains much of the antagonism towards disco in this era, right? And it also explains Marley a fair amount too. There are a lot of AOR touchstones in his work.
01:05:05
Not least of all is that he's making full album statements. But he's also selling a political message and a novel, auteurish vision of popular music. The crossover pop song of 1964 is by the mid-70s. It's now serious music. And this fits in alongside so many mid-70s peers. And I should underscore that the fact that this was such a significant cultural moment has a lot to do with simple demographics. This is a crazy stat. Nearly 50 % of America was under 25 by the mid-60s.
01:05:36
And so convincing this group of the artistic significance of what used to be called teen music into adulthood, it means you're going to sell a whole bunch of records. And by the mid 80s, the same apparatus, it starts to realize something else. The yuppies don't want to hear new evolutions of AOR. They want to keep hearing the AOR of old. And this is when the notion of classic rock is born, which think of the hubris. At this point, AOR is barely 10 years old. That's like crowning this a classic instead of just
01:06:03
part and parcel of contemporary popular music.
01:06:21
You know, I had to get Bootsy in here again, this time sampled by Childish Gambino on Redbone. But today, right, we can all go on Spotify and put Childish Gambino on a playlist next to our 2026 Songs of the Summer. Back in the heyday of rock music, there wasn't a category for archival popular music through most media formats. And so classic rock, it's a radio format that gives that music a home. And it's a way to sell the now higher earning yuppies reissues of their favorite records on CD.
01:06:50
the latest format on the market. And that's the story of neoliberalism and the increased market fragmentation of the music industry in the 80s. One of our DTs will continue in our next episode. But it's also a story of cultural memory, right? Because I think the most interesting thing about classic rock is how a movement that saw itself as subversive in its time could be so comfortably absorbed by the mainstream barely a decade later. mean, Bruce Springsteen inducted Bob Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Of course, there's a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
01:07:20
So Bruce, he inducts right? And he summarizes Rock's entire self-methodology with reference to two people. He says, quote, the way that Elvis freed your body, Bob Dylan freed your mind, end quote. But like, what is Springsteen talking about here? Rock's ascension to cultural immortality, it wasn't accompanied by major overhauls in the social order. Maybe classic rock icons, the Who had it right way back in 1971.
01:07:54
But my snark aside, rock did change how a society viewed itself. In large part because the very project of making the claim that it was significant and transformative, making that claim alone, it made it true. And that process, that's where the real action is. And academics, call it narrating the past to tell history. And narrating the past is both necessary to make sense of the world and a site of politics and power. As British anthropologist Paul Connerton explains, our experience of present, it depends on our knowledge of the past.
01:08:24
And this seems pretty self-evident, right? Think of that movie, Memento, and what a discontinuous experience it would be if you couldn't make new memories. Or culturally, think of the project of the Rastafari and Manley in the 70s, trying to build a present through a reconstructed past. But I'm partial to American historian David Lowenthal here, whose book, The Past is a Foreign Country, it cautions about conflating history and past, because to him, history is both less than and more than the past. Less than.
01:08:53
and that the past was a set of infinite events that history edits and turns into a story consistent with a perspective inherent in the process of telling that story. And more than in that intervening events change how we understand the past. New evidence comes to light and new consequences unfold.
01:09:13
And this is necessary for making sense of the past, because as Lowenthal explains, the contention and discontinuous facts of the past, they only become intelligible once we narrate them, once we turn them into a story.
01:09:27
And it's in that weaving together that the past becomes history. And that, as Haitian-American anthropologist Trouillot puts it, is, the transformation of what happened into that which is said to have happened, end quote. And Trujot, he's got a really great account of how that transformation occurs all over the place in a society. Sure, there are academic historians, and we're taught selected portions of academic histories when we're children. But we mostly learn history elsewhere, when we're consuming the news, narrating history in real time.
01:09:56
or from fictionalized tales produced for entertainment. David Crockett, as Trouillot notes, he was a television character who became a noteworthy historical figure, not the other way around. And that's because mid-century Americans learned more about colonial America from movies and television than from scholars. And that again makes me think of the Rastafari, working through their own philosophy and shared sense of history through popular music, not through treatises or from organized leadership. And in many ways, it's similar to the process of rock becoming classic.
01:10:25
disparate radio stations, record labels, musicians, and audiences were shaping the story that rock told about itself in real time. And this process helped rock consumers understand themselves through the culture they consumed and how they talked about it. And this isn't just a matter of narrativization. It's also a matter of the closely related project of later determining what cultural objects, in this case songs or albums, what songs and albums are worthy of praise and continued consumption. And we have a word for that. That word is canonization.
01:10:56
As German Egyptologist Jan Assmann says, through a canon, quote, societies conceive images of themselves and they maintain their identity through the generations by fashioning a culture out of memory. He continues that through this process of making cultural memory, history becomes myth. This does not make it unreal. On the contrary, this is what makes it real in the sense that it becomes a lasting normative and formative power. End quote.
01:11:22
And so classic rock can tell itself a story of subversion while legitimating power, that deadhead sticker on a Cadillac, when it becomes not so much a demand for a certain world order, but instead a slate of abstract values. Freedom, rebellion, uniqueness, authenticity.
01:11:41
But once the narrative is told, once the canon is set, or at least once arguing over the canon is the focus of your project, it's no longer about the future,
01:11:53
And there's a lot of really sky-is-falling thinking out there along these lines. British music critic Mark Fisher isn't alone in selling something like what he calls the slow cancellation of the future. But pointing his finger at the Arctic Monkeys and Mark Ronson in the mid-2000s, those hawkers of retro rock, Fisher, he sees a story of pop culture no longer being able to imagine the future, only able to reboot the past in increasingly referential ways. Fortisworth, I think Fisher, he's out over his skis a little bit here.
01:12:22
There were countless musicians imagining a different future in the 2000s. But you know what? They weren't making rock music. Because once rock music became classic, once it was curated, narrated, canonized, once rock became a story of the past told to legitimate the present, once rock became a narrative of organized facts instead of contingent and discontinuous events, it stopped being a place where we staged the future.
01:12:51
And so when we reduce rock to relics of the past, narratives, trivial facts of what happened, we lose in no small part its ability to tell the truth about the past. Because at the time, what is now the past, it wasn't a slate of facts at all. It was contingent and alive, imagining a future that never quite came to pass.
01:13:14
And I mentioned earlier Jamaican-American author Marlon James and his great violent novel about Kingston in 1976. In an interview about that book, he had this to say, quote, in Jamaica, you trust rumors. You don't trust facts. Facts come with an agenda. End quote. Bob Marley died in 1981. Not from the political violence or from the rock and roll lifestyle. Now, if you're looking for symbolism in death,
01:13:42
His is somewhere around the European Rasta dialectic. European doctors caught his cancer late because it was a kind that predominantly affects the black community and they didn't look for it. And he refused some professional medical intervention in favor of herbal remedies due to his Rastafari beliefs.
01:14:01
Three years later, Chris Blackwell released Legend. If you have one Marley album at home, it's this one. It's how most listeners around the world have heard Marley, if not reggae music in general.
01:14:16
sold over 20 million copies and is the 17th best-selling album in the United Kingdom. Rock canonization machine Rolling Stone twice called it the 46th best album of all time. So precise, it must be true. But Legend, it's a retrospective compilation album, gathering 14 of Marley's biggest hits in America and Europe in one place. And there's something kind of fitting in the story of the making of classics and Jamaican music, that that's how most people who have consumed Jamaican music have consumed it.
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a retrospective collection that advertises and creates its own significance right there in the title. Legend. And look, for all the posturing, it's a curiously incomplete version of an opinionated, perceptive man. A version that maximizes the symbolism at a cost to the truth. And I'm gonna borrow a concept from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. here. A man who is himself no stranger to being posthumously narrated. The curation in Legend
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It presents Marley not as a voice for positive peace, but as a voice for negative peace. That is to say, it skips tracks calling for Pan-African unity and the end of Babylon, tracks fighting for a more just tomorrow. Tracks like War, where he quotes a Selassie speech that essentially amounts to no justice, no peace.
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significance than the color of his eyes Mr. War
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positive peace. And it leans heavily on songs that sound like broad appeals for peace at all costs. Peace agnostic to the inherent violence in Babylon. Lovely songs, don't get me wrong, but songs that don't implicate the American and European listeners' own complicity in the Babylonian system resulting in Jamaican violence. Songs that you can hear as calls for order regardless of the status quo.
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Negative piece. And that three-year gap between Marley's death and his curated epilogue, it's kind of a limbo. Who was Marley before we knew how to remember him? And who got to decide? That limbo is a lot like the way we experience the present. We exist between the events that happened and the stories we tell ourselves about them. Between what happened and what's said to have happened.
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and each influences the present in different ways. From the highest levels of international politics to Kingston garrisons, conflict in the present is often over both sides, what happens and how we narrate it. The grave irony being that we can never be sure how tomorrow will narrate today.
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The Rastafari movement is widely seen to have failed to notch any significant political wins. It waned after Selassie's death and as the Jamaican cultural mood shifted again in new directions. But it permanently altered how Jamaicans see themselves. Not unlike rock music's impact on American and European culture.
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As for Marley, it's been said that he's more alive in Jamaica's national consciousness than he was during his lifetime.
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And King Tubby, he just altered the trajectory of recorded music around the world from his bathroom in Kingston, Jamaica.
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Thanks for joining for the second episode of The Mine. This is part two of our first series telling a global history of recorded music from the 60s on. There's an accompanying playlist featuring the songs you heard on this podcast and more that's available at listentothemine.com and on the official The Mine Spotify page. You can also find the first episode on our webpage and we'll continue the story in a few weeks, picking up in the 80s on the other side of the digital music revolution. My thanks to Leigh Finnegan.
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Mason Shefa and Jonathan Kermah. And once again to Julie Guillem for her lovely artwork. Thanks again.
[This transcription courtesy of Riverside]